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THE CRITIC OF NATURE AND GENIUS

THE CRITIC OF NATURE AND GENIUS

The vital role of ‘concept’ as our chief means for expressing an evaluation of our present capacities for semantic diagnosis and control is reviewed, leading to chastened expectations that lie intermediate between the excessive optimism of classical thinking and the radical pessimism endemic to pragmatism. These considerations indicate a crucial need for a temperate form of semantic scepticism within our philosophical thinking, a lesson that the present chapter applies to a number of controversies prominent in current debate. An allied viewpoint is brought to bear upon familiar worries about the role of ‘truth’ in our thinking and the problems involved in ‘understanding’ another culture.

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 19 November 2018